Category: Photography

Wine Storage

/ Paul / Leave a comment

Swirl, Sip, Snark and Cellarblog have posted pictures of their wine racks. I’m very impressed with their wine storage. Frank from Drink What You Like also kicked in his photo on Twitter. They have issued a challenge for all Virginia wine blogs to post about their wine storage. Wanting to be part of the in crowd and participate I decided to show how I store my wine. I have two separate areas for my wine. I store them both in my dining room. I have one rack just for white wines and then on the other side of the room I have two racks for all my red wines. Both racks are organized by winery. My wine collection is almost exclusively Virginia wine so I can store them on the racks by winery. This works out well when I’m looking for a specific wine from a specific winery. So here are the pictures of my wine racks. How do you store your wine?

White wine rack…I also have several bottles chilling in the refrigerator.

Red wine racks.

Not to leave out Warren, I will say that he stores his wine in several places around his house. He has most of them in a closet that keeps a pretty constant temperature and lots of darkness.

Harvesting at Gray Ghost

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Yesterday we spent a good chunk of the day at Gray Ghost Vineyards helping to harvest the chardonnay grapes. This has become an annual event for us. This was my 6th year and Warren’s 8th year harvesting. We always have a good time and enjoy meeting new people.

As usual, we got up really early and met others at the winery and enjoyed some breakfast treats before heading out to the vineyards.

Al gave us a quick lesson on how to harvest the grapes.

We then headed out to the vineyards to begin harvesting the grapes.

Here’s Warren hard at work snipping the stems.

We found a small bird nest IN the vines!

A few hours later the lugs were weighed and 11 TONS (yes, tons) of chardonnay grapes had been harvested.

At the end we toasted and cheered for the record breaking harvest and what a good job we had all done! We look forward to repeating this again next year!

On The Road Again!

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After a quick visit to the Woodrow Wilson birthplace and museum in downtown Staunton Virginia, we got in the Virginia Wine Time car and headed to our first winery. Our first stop was Ox-Eye Vineyards tasting room in downtown Staunton. They have a very interesting business model. They do not have a tasting room at the vineyards, instead they have a tasting room in Staunton. We’ll write more about it in the near future.

Our second stop was Attimo Winery just east of Radford Virginia. It took us awhile to get there because of all the construction on I-81 south. They have a beautiful tasting room and an interesting way of tasting at tables and not at the tasting bar…kind of like what they do at Hillsboro. Again, we’ll be posting more about Attimo in the weeks to come. Stay tuned.

Our final stop of the day was at West Wind Vineyard and Winery located just east of I-81 in Max Meadows Virginia. We visited them once three years ago and David remembered us when we were at the Monticello tasting during the wine bloggers conference. It was good to see him and Jason. We tasted the wines and will be reporting about them soon.

We have plans to visit two more wineries tomorrow before heading to Tennessee for a family gathering on Saturday. We’ll return to the trail on Sunday. We have now visited 131 wineries in Virginia! Stay tuned! If you happen to visit any of these wineries, tell them Virginia Wine Time sent you!

Veraison

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Yesterday we started a wine trip to visit wineries in the Shenandoah AVA and in the southern part of the state. We will post about each winery in the weeks to come. On the first day we visited Cave Ridge Vineyard, CrossKeys Vineyards, Bluestone Vineyard, and Barren Ridge Vineyards. We tasted some really nice wines and enjoyed our visit to each winery. Here’s a picture from the Cave Ridge Vineyard. As you can see the grapes are almost finished with veraison. The grapes are developing nicely! We’ll post again tomorrow with the wineries we visited and maybe a few teaser pictures